THE DEATH OF PUTIN

Josef Stalin died on March 5, 1953. The one immediate effect of that event was that the negotiators from North Korea and the People’s Republic of China in the peace talks at Panmunjom to end the Korean War suddenly became less intransigent in their demands.

This was due to the fact that they suddenly didn’t know what level of support they could depend on from the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower had ostentatiously stationed four bombers capable of deploying atomic bombs to a base in Japan that put them in range of Korea and Manchuria. This event was quickly known by the other side, due to the extensive communist penetration of Japan. No one knew for sure whether there were four atomic bombs near the bombers, but the method of delivery was sitting there in plain sight.

And they didn’t know what the Soviet Union would do if those bombs were used. (As it turns out, neither the the North Koreans and Chinese nor the United States knew that - in 1953 - the USSR could do nothing to the United States, since it lacked a delivery system with the range to get there.)

Nevertheless, the peace talks that had been essentially frozen since the fall of 1951 thawed sufficiently that after the United Nations forces defeated a final Chinese ground offensive in July, the war was stopped through an armistice on July 27, 1953.

Past that, there really wasn’t any essential change in the USSR as a result of Stalin’s passing.

That’s because there were too many people who didn’t “pass on,” who had done the dictator’s bidding for the 30 years he had run the USSR, and they were the ones who remained in control. Stalin may have been responsible for the deaths of millions, but there were millions more who had done the grunt work of carrying out those death sentences - arresting the “traitors to the revolution,” putting them on trial, sending them to the gulag, operating the camps, performing the executions in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison, etc., etc. Anyone not complicit was so far removed from access to power, and such a small minority, that there was no chance of the system changing.

It took awhile to sort out who would actually take power. The movie “The Death of Stalin” is a comedy, but it is also very accurate history of this period; what makes it comedic is the things the monsters had to do to sort themselves out.

In the end, Nikita Krushchev, who had been known as “The Butcher of Ukraine” for his services to Stalin as the Commissar in charge of Ukraine following the great famine the communists had imposed on the country in the early 30s, became General Secretary of the Party and effectively in control. Commissar “Shoe Banger” had the blood of several million of his countrymen on his hands.

It still took him two and a half years to finally give the “secret speech” to the 1956 Party Congress, in which he lined out Stalin’s crimes. And that was so sensitive that the West didn’t learn about it for two more years.

Krushchev got “the boot” in 1964 for his “defeats” in the Berlin and Cuban Crises. Yes, the world avoided nuclear catastrophe both times, and he had a big role in that, but to his comrades, what he did was seen as “backing down” to the enemy.

Leonid Brezhnev died before he could be removed for his “defeat” in Afghanistan. By that point, the Stalinist system was so creaky that any reform would destroy it, as happened when Gorbachev tried to create “socialism with a human face.” 38 years after Stalin died, the USSR died.

My point in reciting this history is to point out that those today who think the removal of Putin would result in a regime change in which Russia started behaving in a way acceptable to the rest of the world, that “Putinism” would end, are living in as much of a fantasy as are those who think jailing Trump will end “Trumpism.”

There are no easy solutions, in Moscow or Washington.

There is every likelihood that, if Putin’s war in Ukraine ends the way it appears it will - with Moscow unable to impose its will on the country under any foreseeable circumstances - that he will go the way of every Russian strongman who failed, going back to Tsar Alexander II.

But the system will remain. It’s not a Putin system, or a Bolshevik system, or a Tsarist system. It’s the system of authoritarianism that has run Russia since it became a country. Every “change” has resulted in the eventual reimposition of the system.

We need to stop looking for easy solutions. Anywhere.

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